UK cracks down on antibiotic abuse

In a major clampdown on the rampant abuse of antibiotics, Britain has decided to penalize doctors who give in to patients’ demands for the drugs that are fast becoming ineffective.Kounteya Sinha | TNN | August 19, 2015, 08:20 IST

India has emerged as the world's largest consumer of antibiotics.LONDON: In a major clampdown on the rampant abuse of antibiotics, Britain has decided to penalize doctors who give in to patients’ demands for the drugs that are fast becoming ineffective.

Investigations have revealed that almost 10 million prescriptions issued for antibiotics in England each year are unnecessary.

Professor Mark Baker, director of Nice, added, “It’s not just prescribers who should be questioned about their attitudes and beliefs about antibiotics. It’s often patients themselves who, because they don’t understand that their condition will clear up by itself, or that perhaps antimicrobials aren’t effective in treating it, may put pressure on their doctor to prescribe an antibiotic when it is not indicated and they are unlikely to benefit from it”.

He then warns that “the loss of power of antibiotics threatens the whole basis of modern medicine”.

A British government-funded review recently recommended that pharmaceutical companies set up a $2-billion global incentive fund to look for new antibiotics. Not a single new antibiotic — known to be the magic bullets of medical science — has been discovered in over 30 years.

Economist and former chair of Goldman Sachs Asset Management Jim O’Neil, who was asked by British PM David Cameron to look at the impact superbugs, concluded that drug-resistant infections will cost the world 10 million extra deaths a year and up to $100 trillion by 2050, if the global increase is not stopped. Currently, 700,000 deaths each year are attributed to drug resistance.

O’Neil has recommended that $37billion should be made available over a decade to reward pharmaceutical companies that successfully discover brand-new antibiotics.

Britain has classified drug-resistant superbugs as the most significant civil threat to the country — second only to terrorism as a national threat. Estimates released last week say as many as 80,000 people could die if there was an outbreak of drug-resistant infections in the UK. If a widespread outbreak were to occur, estimates say 200,000 people will be affected.

Nice says overall antibiotic prescription in England has been steadily increasing over several years. Nationally, 41.6 million antibiotic prescriptions were issued in 2013-14 at a cost of £192 million to the NHS. Despite considerable guidance that trend should be curbed, 9 out of 10 GPs say they feel pressured to prescribe antibiotics. According to them, 97% of the patients who ask for antibiotics are prescribed them.

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A bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V K Rao passed the order while acting on a PIL filed by Delhi-based dermatologist Zaheer Ahmed who complained that lakhs of medicines were being sold on the internet every day without much regulation, posing a huge risk to patients and doctors alike.